Collective Wisdom

Hélène Landemore is a graduate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Sciences Po, Paris, and Harvard University (PhD, 2008). After holding postdoctoral positions at the Collège de France in Paris, Brown University, and MIT, she is now an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is the author of Hume: probabilité et choix raisonnable (2004). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Raison Publique, Synthese, Critical Review and Political Psychology. Jon Elster has been a professor at the Collège de France since 2005. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europaea, the Norwegian Academy of Science and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Valencia, Stockholm, Trondheim, Bogotá, Torcuata di Tella and Louvain-la-Neuve. Elster is the author of 23 monographs, which have been translated into 18 languages. Most recently, these include L'Irrationalité; Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist; Le Désintéressement; Explaining Social Behavior; Agir contre soi; Closing the Books; and Alchemies of the Mind.

• 1. Collective wisdom: old and new Hélène Landemore; 2. Prediction markets: trading uncertainty for collective wisdom Emile Servan-Schreiber; 3. Designing wisdom through the web: the passion of ranking Gloria Origgi; 4. Some microfoundations of collective wisdom Scott Page and Lu Hong; 5. What has collective wisdom to do with wisdom? Daniel Andler; 6. Legislation, planning, and deliberation John Ferejohn; 7. Epistemic democracy in classical Athens: sophistication, diversity, and innovation Josiah Ober; 8. The optimal design of a constituent assembly Jon Elster; 9. Sanior pars and major pars in the contemporary aeropagus: medicine evaluation committees in France and the United States Philippe Urfalino; 10. Collective wisdom: lessons from the theory of judgment aggregation Christian List; 11. Democracy counts: should rulers be numerous? David Estlund; 12. Democratic reason: the mechanisms of collective intelligence in politics Hélène Landemore; 13. Rational ignorance and beyond Gerry Mackie; 14. The myth of the rational voter and political theory Bryan Caplan; 15. Collective wisdom and institutional design Adrian Vermeule; 16. Reasoning as a social competence Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier; 17. Conclusion Jon Elster.

“In bringing together essays by students of politics, economics, philosophy, history, and cognitive science – disciplines that have much to say to each other but engage in joint conversation too rarely – Landemore and Elster make a significant contribution. Many of the individual articles are by scholars working at the frontiers of their respective fields. No work on collective intelligence has covered the subject with such breadth, scope, or wisdom.” – Robert Laubacher, Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Sloan School of Management